We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

How Classical Theology Gets It Wrong
Classical theology has conceived of God as altogether necessary, simple, timeless, unchanging and unknowable. This view of God requires us to conclude that biblical images of God do not reflect the way God truly is insofar as they portray God moving in sequence with humans from the past into the future, for this obviously conflicts with God’s timelessness. Yet, no one disputes that most, if not all, biblical depictions of God portray God in just this fashion. The same holds true of biblical depictions of God being impacted by, and responding to, human activity, or of God changing his plans in light of actions that humans take. Moreover, those who espouse this classical view of God, interpret all depictions of God grieving, getting angry, being frustrated, or suffering out of love for wayward humans as failing to reflect God’s true nature.
In fact, some have gone so far as to claim that biblical depictions fail to reflect the way God truly is insofar as they simply portray the God-world relationship as something that is real to both God and the world. I challenge readers to find a biblical image of God that depicts the God-world relationship as other than real to both God and the world.
When biblical authors depict God’s relationship to the world in any of these ways, they conflict with the classical conception of God. According to classical theists, these sorts of depictions must therefore be interpreted as accommodations, anthropomorphisms, and/or as examples of Scripture speaking in terms of how God appears to us rather than in terms of how God actually is. Portraits of God with these dynamic and relational characteristics—which is true to some degree for every divine portrait in Scripture—must be judged to be falling short of the truth.
In fact, some have argued that to interpret biblical depictions of God dynamically interacting with his people as reflecting the way God truly is borders on idolatry. For example, Herbert McCabe argues that, “the God spoken of by those who insist on God’s participation in the history of his people, sharing their experiences, their sufferings and triumphs, is perilously like one of the gods” (God Matters, 42).
By disallowing the depictions of God’s sequential, dynamic, personal, mutually influential relationship with his people to reflect the way God truly is, classical theology has actually undermined the most distinctive and most distinctly beautiful dimension of the Bible’s portrait of God.
We should ground all our thinking about God, from start to finish, in the beautiful revelation of God in the crucified Christ as witnessed to in Scripture. And when we ground our reflections in this starting point, it makes all the difference in the world!
If we anchored all of our thinking in the cross, would it ever occur to us to suspect that God is altogether immutable or “above” experiencing sequences? The Word was made flesh and became our sin and our curse! If we trust this revelation, God apparently can change and God apparently does experience a “before” and “after”! Along the same lines, if our complete trust was in this supreme revelation and not in our own reasoning processes, would we ever suspect that God cannot be impacted by what transpires in the world or that God can’t suffer? If we trust that the one who hung in agony on the cross reveals God’s true nature, would we not rather conclude that God is profoundly impacted by what transpires in the world and is capable of the greatest suffering imaginable? And finally, if all our reflections about God began with the cross, I submit that the very last thing we would ever suspect is that the relationship between God and the world is real to us but not to God!
Photo credit: Josh Felise via Unsplash
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Classical Theism, Cruciform Theology, Philosophy
Topics: Attributes and Character
Related Reading

Scripture’s God-Breathed Imperfections
“Inerrancy” of Scripture
As a conservative evangelical who accepted the “inerrancy” of Scripture, I used to be profoundly disturbed whenever I confronted contradictions in Scripture, or read books that made strong cases that certain aspects of the biblical narrative conflict with archeological findings.

Does the Author of Hebrews Condone Capital Punishment? A Response to Paul Copan (#12)
In his critique of Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG), Paul Copan argues that several New Testament authors condone capital punishment as directly willed by God. The most challenging for my thesis, in my estimation, is Hebrews 10:26-29, which reads: For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth,…

Modern Theologians and the Centrality of Christ
During the twentieth century the development of a Christocentric reading of the Scriptures—which is crucial to understanding what I argue in Crucifixion of the Warrior God—surged in the wake of Karl Barth’s publication of his Romans commentary in 1916. It was justifiably described as a “bombshell” that fell “on the playground of the theologians,” demolishing…

Overemphasizing Christ?
In response to my work, some have argued that I tend to overemphasize Christ. In light of the claim that in Jesus we have the one and only definitive Word of God and that no previous revelation should ever be placed alongside him or allowed to qualify what he reveals about God, some allege that…

Podcast: How Do You Teach a Cruciform Hermeneutic from the Pulpit?
Greg talks about infallibility and inerrancy. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0281.mp3

God’s Non-Violent Ideal in the OT
While God condescended to working within the violent-prone, fallen framework of his people in the Old Testament—as I argue in Crucifixion of the Warrior God—the OT is also full of references to how God worked to preserve his non-violent ideal as much as possible. He did this by continually reminding his people not to place…